Social data nerds, rejoice: Twitter released on Thursday an interactive map showing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney's most engaging tweets by state.
By default, the map shows a list of both candidates' most interactive tweets. When you click each tweet, the map changes to reflect how popular each tweet was throughout the 50 states. Tweets are sorted by overall engagement, but they can also be sorted by engagement per state.
Users can search by keyword to find tweets relevant to a topic of interest -- "college" or "Iraq," for example. Clicking an individual state also reveals the hot topics being discussed in that state.
Some of the results make perfect sense -- a Romney tweet about coal, for instance, was most popular in the coal-producing states:
"Throughout the 2012 election season, the biggest topics and emerging trends have played out on Twitter, offering an extensive dataset for our Analytics team to explore," Miguel Rios, part of Twitter's analytics team, wrote in a blog post about the map.
"Prominent issues in this year’s campaign range from Pell Grants for students to Medicare for the elderly, from coal production to clean energy," he continued. "Of course, the salience of these issues varies greatly by state. A great deal of media and campaign attention focuses on statewide polling, so we’ve been particularly interested in how users engage with political content on a statewide level."
Ready to give the map a spin for yourself? Check it out right here: Twitter Political Engagement Map. Then, share your most interesting finds with us in the comments.
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